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"When
considering the structure of a project and the
principal factors that make a project
successful, there is a good reason to wonder if,
up until now - six months after the Quake,
anyone can talk about a Haiti rebuilding
project."
On
January 12, 2010, a dreadful earthquake hit
Haiti. Thousands of families lost their homes,
and the majority of government buildings,
schools and churches collapsed; many people lost
their lives, it was a total disaster. The large
TV networks such as Al Jazeera and CNN displayed
the gruesome images of collapsed buildings, the
decomposing bodies of innocent men, women and
children abandoned on the streets, and amputees
fighting for their lives. The people all over
the world became sympathetic to the fate of the
Haitian people. Thousands of foreign rescue
workers converged in Haiti, coming as far as
Israel and money poured into the American Red
Cross, the White House, the United Nations and
other non-government aid organizations.
Meanwhile,
the Haitian communities in the United States and
Canada, who represent an estimated 1/3 of the
Haitian population positioned themselves as
rightful stakeholders and began to organize
large meetings to discuss the Haiti
reconstruction project. The idea of a Haiti
reconstruction project began to take shape. The
UN assigned former president Bill Clinton as the
project coordinator, or technically the sponsor,
a decision that raised eyebrows due to the
extent of this prospective project and the
responsibility that former president already
have toward his foundation and his Global
Initiative.
New
leadership has emerged in the Haitian
communities throughout the Diaspora; the fight
for control has begun among Haitian leaders and
activists. They raced aggressively to make up
their small clans with hopes of taking the lead
of the reconstruction project despite their
ignorance of the challenges ahead. On the other
hand, a few power brokers close to President
Rene Preval and his wife met in Petion-Ville, a
few miles from Port-Au-Prince, and rushed to put
together a nonsensical plan, with no risk
management strategy, no communication plan, no
scope, no work estimates, called it a project
and attached a multi-million dollar price tag to
it. Shortly after, they set in motion a crusade
in Canada and the U.S. to sell this so call
“project” with no plans.
It’s
no surprise that an educated man who attended an
informational meeting on the Haiti Project at
MIT in Cambridge, said: “I have not seen any
project, this is the Haiti’s way of conducting
business.” A Dominican official said plainly:
“This project is not acceptable.”
When
considering the structure of a project and the
principal factors that make a project
successful, there is a good reason to wonder if,
up until now -six months after the earthquake,
anyone can talk about a Haiti rebuilding
project. If there is a project, there are so
many fundamental elements missing in the plan
that they proposed, we can say it objectively;
this project is doomed to fail if the UN leaders
don’t make a decision to reassess their
strategy. I explain:
A
project is a job that has a time to begin and a
time to end; it must be completed within budget
and meet the expectations of the stakeholders.
No one can tell exactly what the Haiti
rebuilding project is. When and where it starts?
When will it end? The basic project management
requirements have not been met.
Project
management is not a show business that can be
led by Hollywood superstars and powerful
politicians. Projects need experienced project
managers to put together a great team to plan
and control it and to bring a quality
deliverable, in the case of this Haiti project,
to build a modern capital.
We certainly need the abilities of
politicians and superstars to raise funds to
support and provide the resources necessary for
the project to succeed.
Rebuilding
Haiti is definitely a huge project that got the
attention of the global community and major news
networks. The size of the project is important
but the interest of the media and the uniqueness
of the catastrophic situation that this
particular project is expected to resolve makes
it even more popular.
Where
does the Haiti reconstruction project stand six
months after the earthquake?
All
projects have a life cycle: the initiation,
planning, executing and closure. During the
initiation phase of any project the
stakeholders, meaning everyone who will be
involved, affected or benefit from the project
have to work together to define and agree upon
the purpose of the project and the goals that
need to be accomplished. The stakeholders are
the United Nations, large donors, the Haitian
government, the Haitian Diaspora and the
residents and employees of the cities and towns
to rebuild.
The
United Nations and Haitian experts should then
work together on determining the project scope,
meaning the amount of work that should be done,
a rough estimate of the cost, a responsibility
matrix, a communication plan and a set of rules
that will lead the project to success. The last
step in this phase is to write the project
charter, which will name the project and issue
the authority to a project manager or a project
management firm to plan and execute the project,
starting with establishing the project office.
Those are the first steps to take and the basic
principles to make project successful.
Who’s
in charge of this Haiti rebuilding project?
The
project responsibility matrix is fundamental,
this is the document that state clearly who is
in charge of what in the project. This is one of
the key elements missing in the plan proposed by
the UN and the Haitian government. Of course,
there is a mixed commission composed of a group
of people handpicked by the UN and the Haitian
government, but so far it is not clear who is
part of the group and what is the specific
responsibility of each member. It is impossible
to identify a project manager that has practical
skills in the Haiti rebuilding project. All we
hear about this project is a bunch of
politicians, government officials and Hollywood
superstars who are using the Haitian people’s
fate as a platform to build up their fame around
the world as the greatest humanitarian or
candidate for the next Nobel Prize. If there is
a responsibility matrix, I am not aware of it
and it is not available to the general public.
We
all know that former president Bill Clinton
represents the donor’s interest and serves as
the sponsor of the project and Prime Minister
Bellerive represents the Haitian government. We
are still trying to find out who represents this
very active Diaspora who expressed their
enthusiasm to contribute their ideas and
expertise to the rebuilding of their country. In
fact, former president Bill Clinton is just a
facilitator, a man that put his credibility on
the line to promise the donors that their funds
will be used only for the rebuilding project.
Bill Clinton is too busy to give the full
commitment that a project sponsor would have to
give to a large project such as rebuilding
Haiti. The project sponsor should be in constant
contact with the project manager.
Former
president Clinton is definitely the best asset
Haiti has today because of his popularity and
respect in the global world and his achievements
for putting together a strategic plan to boost
the US economy from a deficit to a surplus while
he was president. Nevertheless, Bill Clinton is
not a project manager.
One
of the success factors of a project is a good
communication plan. A project communication plan
is designed to keep all the stakeholders
informed, it should state clearly how the
project team, the Haitian people, the donors,
the UN and the media will receive information as
the project progresses and what type of
information will be available to them. In this
phase, they should take into account small media
outlets in Dominican Republic and in Haiti, the
two countries that will be particularly affected
by the project. Communicating information
through the major networks will not serve the
purpose since most Haitians and Dominicans
receive their primary information through their
respective media in their own languages. With a
lack of or no established communication tunnel,
from my experience as a Project Manager, the
stakeholders would have no choice than rejecting
the whole project and be opposed to its
execution. We have seen well-planned projects,
with maximum resources such as the “Supercollider”,
failed because of lack of communication. The
Challenger, a well-financed space vehicle, was a
disaster because of lack of communication
between the team members.
The
Supercollider was a project run mostly by
physicists who had found a new technology that
was supposedly going to assist with medical
research. The U.S. Congress funded this project. When Congress had to choose a program to cut because their
budget was tightened, the Supercollider project
and the space program where competing for the
same funds.
The Supercollider eventually lost out to
the space program because the physicists were
very skilled in their industry, however, they
could not explain to the public in
understandable terms how this project would
benefit them and their futures.
All
of these primary activities must be part of a
well-structured project initiation. It is only
after this phase; the project would now be ready
to move to the planning stage. In the planning
phase, the team, sponsor, customers (the UN and
the Haitian government) and the project managers
will work on a detailed plan to execute and
control the project. There will be certainly
some change in the project estimate after the
planning, since the detail will reveal more jobs
to be performed, but the principal tools in the
project initiation would help to get down to
this detailed planning.
The
first official donors meeting in New York,
orchestrated by the Clintons, was essential but
too precipitated, the UN and the Haitian
government was not prepared to submit a good
project proposal to the donors, for that reason
many educated diplomats refused to make a solid
pledge and the meeting was not successful. A
project meeting should be about project scope,
budget, time and deliverables. In that meeting,
there were many empty speeches but nothing
convincing.
The
budget figures presented cannot even be
considered as an educated guess since there
weren’t any facts to support them. You cannot
estimate a project without a scope and more
precisely without a work breakdown structure
that will explain in detail the nature of each
work package to accomplish and its cost. No
matter the size of a project, a PM still can
make an accurate estimate to make a budget but
not without a clear understanding of the project
definition. If you don’t know what the
challenges are and the constraints of what
you’re going to build, how can you tell me how
much it will cost?
Last
week, a UN spokesperson declared that the UN
does not have land to build housing for the
victims of the earthquake; this is a good
indication that the UN has no clue of what it is
planning to build. All the talk about rebuilding
is simply a bluff. The only facts the UN can
explain about Haiti are its crazy spending.
$72,500 per day for a boat, just to provide
housing for peacekeepers. Our elite US Navy and
Marine soldiers are sleeping in the woods of
Afghanistan and in tents and sleeping bags all
over the world to spread peace and democracy
while these fat belly UN peacekeepers are
sleeping on a luxury cruise boat that cost
$72,500 per day.
Do
they take us for a bunch of fools that will take
anything for truth? Project management is both
art and science; there are methods and
principles to follow when designing a successful
project and those are these basic principles
that I have used to measure the legitimacy of
the Haiti rebuilding project and as a result, I
conclude: It is a bogus project. If they need a
project management specialist to help with
planning and executing a successful Haiti
rebuilding project within a reasonable budget,
help is right around the corner.
Jacques
Dady Jean, BS, MBA is a US-trained project
manager and an IT professional, he is also a
project management instructor and President of
the Mattapan School of Technology
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